Flying solo in my fifties

oasis

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The other night two Egyptian football teams were playing each other. I found this out after hearing intermittent roars echoing around the hotel before I left to walk into town. It was probably the best walk past all the shops I’ve ever had, in that no one was interested in selling anything to me – they were all crowded around a series of tiny television sets on the street and punching the air with glee.

After a frustrating night trying to find a restaurant with wifi, we ended up on the roof terrace of Jasmine, lounging on cushions, listening to the soft crash of the waves and looking at the stars. Santana’s Oye Como Va came on the sound system. What a perfect soundtrack to this hippy heaven, I thought. The restaurant manager said Carlos Santana was his all-time favourite musician. Can’t argue with his choice.

This cat is a regular at Sheikh Ali – he decided to join me poolside…

Yesterday I thought I’d have a lazy day by the hotel pool, just reading and chilling out. At around 10.30am the sound of one voice singing started coming from a mosque near the hotel. It was quickly joined by another from a different mosque. It was so beautiful, and I did try and Periscope it, but the wifi wasn’t enough for the app to register the sound. After a while the singing turned to impassioned declarations, then singing again before it stopped at midday. I was later told that this happens every Friday. This is the equivalent of Sunday morning church bells – every Muslim should attend the mosque, if they can, and they are excused from work to do so if they need to.

I began to think about all the sounds of Dahab and how I love all of them. The music, calls to prayer, the dogs barking at each other, the crash of the sea at night, the cat fights, the sound of the wind in the flames of a fire in the desert, the friendly shouts between Dahabeyans (if that’s the word for them), even the fake bird tweets in restaurants that signify a dish to be picked up from the kitchen.

And then there’s the silence of the mountains. I visited Wadi Qunai in the evening with a Bedouin guide and once the air-conditioning in the 4×4 had switched off, there was a profound presence in the air. I realised that the silence was almost a sound in itself. I could hear the buzz of my own circulating blood in my ears just above it. It wasn’t until it turned dark that the desert black beetle started up its peeping, joined by others round the canyon. We drew our cushions up on our rug and lay down to look at the stars. I could see the Milky Way, and track satellites passing across it on the same orbit.

Wadi Qunai, an oasis in the Sinai mountains, south of Dahab

Before this, our Bedouin guide had made bread for us, the traditional way. He had been taught how to do it by his father, who still lives in the mountains, and when I asked if he’d taught his sons the same method, he said that they were too interested in their phones… This sounds familiar.

First, he put a handful of salt in a bowl, added water, and swished it around until the salt was dissolved. Then he added flour – a special one for baking in sand, apparently – and began to knead.

The Great Bedouin Bake Off begins.

Once the dough was in a soft, but tight ball, he flattened it out on a tray. The fire he’d built had calmed down to glowing coals, which were slowly sifted until he’d moved the top layer away. Then the bread was placed on top and covered over with coals using a stick.

After about ten minutes, the coals were removed, and the loaf scraped, wiped and banged to remove any traces of sand or gravel from it. He cut the bread into pieces and we dipped it in soft feta drowned in olive oil.

He showed us how to slurp sweet tea with the mixture still in our mouths. The combination of this sweetness, with the salty, chargrilled bread, and the savouriness of the cheese tasted like the best pizza I’ve ever had. Eating it below the stars was an added bonus.

As the guide baked, I told him about Nadiya Hussain, who has recently helped to change perceptions of British Muslimhood through her baking abilities and good nature. We talked about Islamophobia and he suggested that ISIS are the problem, “They have given Islam a bad name”, he said. “I don’t know what book they are reading. Mohammed lived like this [gestures at fire and bread] – the simple life. He would not even kill an ant if it walked by. He tells us we have to let it go by. To let it live.”